Naming the white elephant in the room
Unser Land: eine Kolonie. Unser Kopf: eine Kolonie. Unser Herz: eine Kolonie. Laut Christian Ortiz haben europäische Eliten in den letzten 500 Jahren ein Herrschaftssystem etabliert, das alle Bereiche unseres Lebens, ja sogar unser Denken und Fühlen dominiert. Mit seinen Texten gelingt ihm das seltene Kunststück, das Politische im Persönlichen und das Persönliche im Politischen zu benennen. Eine Entdeckung.
Projection: The Lazy Substitute for Accountability
By Christian Ortiz, Mar 9
Oye, mira.
I’m a Decolonial Social Scientist. I study the world before, during, and after European colonization. I help society connect how this history shows up today in media, law, education, and even in our brains and nervous systems, shaped by how we’ve been racialized. To do this work, I operate through historically provable, accurately documented realities recorded outside the colonizer’s gaze. I set clear rules and non-negotiables. My primary one is this: oppression is not a debate. I define oppression in its simplest form as anything that discriminates against people based on their lived identities outside of enforced social norms. That includes violence, verbal or physical, targeting 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, Afro-Indigenous people, Asian communities, immigrants and migrants, disabled people, and neurodivergent people. It includes anti-Black racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and all systems designed to exclude, surveil, and harm. These aren’t isolated behaviors. They’re connected governance structures rooted in the same colonial logic that invented race, normalized patriarchy, and built institutions to protect whiteness and extract from everyone else. My work names that connection and refuses to treat any form of targeted harm as negotiable, conditional, or up for debate.
Let’s talk about projection, because people keep treating it like a personal quirk, a little interpersonal mess, a “trigger,” a “misunderstanding.” That framing isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. Projection, at scale, is a governance technology. It’s the emotional outsourcing of accountability. It’s the moment an unhealed person feels a surge of shame, fear, envy, or guilt, and instead of metabolizing it, they throw it onto whoever is closest, whoever is less protected, whoever the system has already marked as disposable. Projection follows power lines. It travels down hierarchies that were built on purpose.
White people project criminality onto Black and brown people because they can’t face the violence embedded in their own racial inheritance. Men project hysteria onto women because they refuse to sit with their own emotional dysregulation. Settlers project savagery onto Indigenous people because acknowledging genocide means losing the myth of innocent founding. Abled people project burden onto disabled people because confronting interdependence shatters the illusion of independence they were promised under capitalism.
This is colonial reflex. It’s what happens when people are conditioned to believe they deserve comfort, control, and innocence at all times, and anything that threatens that story gets externalized onto someone else. The system rewards this. It builds entire institutions around it. Policing is projection with badges. Psychiatry is projection with diagnosis. Border enforcement is projection with deportation. The carceral state runs on projected danger. The medical-industrial complex runs on projected defect. Projection protects power by making the targeted person responsible for the projector’s unprocessed feelings. It flips accountability.
Suddenly, the person being harmed has to manage the emotional wreckage of the person doing harm. The Black woman gets called angry for naming racism. The trans person gets called predatory for existing in public. The neurodivergent person gets called difficult for requesting accommodation. The migrant gets called illegal for surviving. The system encourages it, because as long as people are projecting their unhealed shit onto each other, they’re not organizing against the structure that broke them in the first place. And here’s the part people don’t want to hear: you can’t heal your way out of being a projection target under structural oppression.
You can go to therapy, you can set boundaries, you can learn every communication framework, and the system will still mark you for disposal. Because projection isn’t about you. It’s about the projector’s refusal to face what the system did to them and what they’re now doing to you. Projection and verbal attacks come from insecurity, however naming that doesn’t make the wound harmless, understanding someone’s pain doesn’t mean you have to accept their violence. Yes, projection comes from insecurity. The insecurity of knowing you’re complicit. The insecurity of benefiting from harm you didn’t personally design but still cash checks from. The insecurity of watching someone exist freely in ways you were punished for even imagining. The insecurity of facing your own expendability under the same system you’re defending.
White people project onto Black, brown and Asian people because they’re insecure about what their wealth actually cost, who actually built it, what their ancestors actually did, and what they’re still doing by staying silent. Men project onto women because they’re insecure about their own emotional illiteracy, their own need for care, their own fear of being seen as weak under patriarchy’s impossible standards. Settlers project onto Indigenous people because they’re insecure about living on stolen land, calling it home, raising children in a place they have no ancestral right to. Abled people project onto disabled people because they’re insecure about their own fragility, their own inevitable decline, their own fear of being discarded the moment they can’t produce. These insecurities aren’t random. They’re structurally installed through societal conditioning.
The system creates them on purpose because insecure people are easier to control, easier to turn against each other, easier to weaponize. Colonialism made white people insecure about their humanity, so they dehumanized everyone else to feel secure. Capitalism made everyone insecure about their worth, so we measure it in productivity and punish rest. Patriarchy made men insecure about their manhood, so they police everyone’s gender to protect a category that was always a cage. Women project beauty standards set by pedophiles and patriarchs onto other women because they’re insecure about aging, about taking up space, about being valued for anything beyond appearance and reproductive capacity. They police other women’s bodies, clothes, makeup, weight, because facing the fact that no amount of compliance will protect them from misogyny means confronting their own expendability once youth and desirability are gone.
Projection is what happens when people refuse to turn that insecurity inward, refuse to ask what the system took from them, refuse to grieve what they lost by participating in someone else’s dispossession. Instead, they externalize it. They find someone with less protection and make them carry the weight of feelings they won’t name. The person being projected onto becomes the dumping ground for unprocessed shame, fear, envy, rage that was never theirs to hold. The only way projection stops operating as a governance tool is when we refuse to accept it as normal, when we name it for what it is, political, not personal, and when we hold people accountable for the violence they externalize instead of asking their targets to absorb it. Stop calling it miscommunication. Stop calling it conflict. Stop pathologizing the person on the receiving end. Projection is a weapon. Treat it like one.
Under colonial rule, that conversion was never random. European empires needed a way to do unspeakable things, then sleep at night. So they built a story that the violence was self-defense, the theft was destiny, the rape was civilization, the genocide was progress. Projection was the emotional engine of that story. The colonizer called Indigenous Nations “savages” while practicing land theft, forced removals, child kidnapping, and cultural erasure. The colonizer called Africans “primitive” while building global wealth through chattel slavery, mutilation, rape, forced breeding, cannibalism, practicing human upholstery on enslaved people, and the transformation of human beings into commodities.
They accused the colonized of barbarism while wearing their skin as leather, using their bodies as medical experiments, displaying their remains in museums, and writing scientific papers about their supposed inferiority. When power is doing atrocity, it cannot afford self-recognition. Projection becomes the mirror it refuses to look into, so it shatters the mirror and blames the glass.
The British called India chaotic while engineering famines that killed millions. The United States called Indigenous people violent while carrying out systematic extermination campaigns. Belgium called the Congolese uncivilized while King Leopold’s forces amputated hands, killed ten million people, and extracted rubber through terror. France called Algerians backwards while torturing resistance fighters and bombing entire villages. Spain called the Americas godless while priests blessed the rape of Indigenous women and the burning of sacred texts.
This projection was operational necessity. You can’t commit genocide while seeing yourself as genocidal. You can’t build an empire on mass death while believing you are civilized. You can’t extract entire continents while thinking of yourself as generous. Projection allows the perpetrator to remain innocent in their own story. It transfers the crime onto the victim. The colonized become the threat that justified the violence, the chaos that necessitated order, the darkness that required enlightenment. The structure stays stable because the people enforcing it never have to face what they are actually doing.
That’s why projection, in the present, is not merely interpersonal. It’s structural. The same reflex that protected empire now protects institutions. The same emotional dodge that protected plantation order now protects corporate order, classroom order, workplace order, border order, policing order, platform order. Projection is how whiteness-as-governance preserves itself without having to admit it is a system that feeds on hierarchy.
Social media has industrialized projection. Comment sections are projection at scale, unmoderated and algorithmically amplified. Someone posts about experiencing racism at work. Within minutes, strangers who’ve never met them call them divisive, a “grifter,” playing the victim, making it about race when it’s really about professionalism. The commenter can’t sit with the fact they benefit from a system that harms others, so they project their discomfort onto the person naming the harm, reframing the truth-teller as the problem.
An unhealed person encounters a truth that threatens their identity, their status, their belonging, their sense of being “good.” Their nervous system spikes. Instead of asking, “Why does this land in my body like a threat,” they ask, “Who can I make responsible for this feeling.” Projection is that handoff. It turns internal rupture into external accusation. It converts discomfort into moral panic. It makes the other person the problem so the projector can stay intact.
And social media supercharged this because it pairs emotional activation with information scarcity. A headline becomes a verdict. A clip becomes a courtroom. A rumor becomes a “pattern.” A stranger becomes a symbol. Let’s face it, it’s profitable. Platforms are designed to maximize engagement, and engagement is most easily harvested through outrage and fear. When you’ve got a traumatized nervous system, a feed engineered for adrenaline, and a culture that confuses certainty with intelligence, projection becomes the easiest drug to sell. Content creators who force purity politics are also guilty of this, as they monetize through performative rage and projection while claiming to do justice work.
These creators build entire brands on calling people out, on public shaming rituals, on dragging someone for a five-year-old tweet or an out-of-context clip. They perform spectacle, and not real accountability. They accumulate followers by feeding people’s need to feel righteous without organizing for collective liberation. They project their own complicity, their own contradictions, their own unhealed harm onto whoever becomes the target of the week. They perform anger for clout while profiting off the same systems they claim to dismantle. Real accountability culture requires context, process, and repair.
It centers the harm done and works toward conditions where that harm stops repeating. It asks what structures enabled this, who holds power here, what needs to shift so this person and this community can move differently. Accountability culture done right is rigorous, relational, and rooted in material change. It demands pattern interruption and resource redistribution.
Purity politics demands flawlessness from people also surviving under oppression while ignoring the structures actually causing harm.
It focuses on individual moral failure instead of systemic violence because individuals are easier to destroy than institutions are to dismantle. It turns movements into popularity contests and reduces solidarity to who can perform the most radical position in the least amount of characters. I was guilty of this for years on social media until I realized how unsustainable and chaotic it is.
The people doing this work live under the same conditions, navigate the same contradictions, but they stay safe because they pointed the finger first. Purity politics punishes people publicly without offering process, repair, or structural change. It performs accountability without doing the work accountability requires. The algorithm rewards spectacle. Every callout post, every exposed thread, every dragging generates clicks, shares, comments, revenue. Platforms don’t care about justice, they care about time spent on app.
Projection keeps people scrolling because it promises resolution without requiring action. You don’t have to organize, you don’t have to redistribute resources, you don’t have to risk anything. You pick a side, perform your allegiance, and watch someone else get destroyed. The spectacle replaces the movement, and nothing structurally shifts. Accountability without process is just violence with better branding. Now add racialization, because projection is not distributed evenly. People with institutional protection can project with fewer consequences. People targeted by the system pay the cost. That’s the asymmetry that polite discourse keeps trying to flatten. When a person racialized as white projects, their projection can be mistaken for “concern,” “standards,” “safety,” “professionalism,” “objectivity,” “common sense.” That translation is one of the oldest tricks of racial empire logic. It turns domination into decorum.
This is why so much projection shows up as accusation. “You’re the real racist.” “You’re the one dividing people.” “You’re too emotional.” “You’re dangerous.” “You’re exaggerating.” “You’re making it about race.” These phrases aren’t random. They are the script of innocence shielding. They are the Whiteness Defense Protocol in everyday language: a routine that restores comfort and control when accountability shows up.
Projection also merges with implicit conditioning, the learned, subconscious associations that societies absorb from repeated images, narratives, and institutional signals. People are trained, from childhood, to associate danger, incompetence, criminality, or disorder with certain groups, and then they mistake that training for “gut feeling” or “just being realistic.” Research and analysis on implicit bias has long shown how these associations can operate without conscious intent while still producing devastating outcomes, including split-second threat perception that becomes lethal. When the culture trains you to see a weapon where none exists, projection becomes a trigger you can fire, and someone else becomes the target.
Projection is also intersectional. It doesn’t only ride race. It rides gender, sexuality, disability, body size, immigration status, language, class, neurotype. Patriarchy uses projection to punish women and femme people for refusing containment. You can watch it happen in real time: a woman sets a boundary and suddenly she’s “aggressive,” “cold,” “dramatic,” “ungrateful,” “unprofessional.” A queer or trans person asserts their reality and suddenly they’re “confusing kids,” “forcing an agenda,” “asking for special treatment.” A disabled person asks for access and suddenly they’re “difficult,” “lazy,” “demanding.” A neurodivergent person communicates differently and suddenly they’re “rude,” “weird,” “unstable,” “too much.” That’s projection doing what it was designed to do: defend norms that were built to preserve hierarchy.
Patriarchy doesn’t just make men project onto women. It makes people project their own queerness, their own gender non-conformity, their own desires onto others with violent force. The most vicious homophobia often comes from people policing in themselves what they’ve been taught to fear. They grow up in systems that punish softness in boys, desire between men, femininity in anyone assigned male, any deviation from the script patriarchy wrote. They learn early that queerness means danger, exile, violence, loss of family, loss of status, loss of protection. So they bury it. They suppress it. They perform heterosexuality and rigid gender like their lives depend on it, because under patriarchy, sometimes they do.
When someone else lives openly as queer, as gay, as trans, as fluid, it threatens the entire structure that person built to survive. Suddenly there’s proof that you can exist outside the binary and still be here. That you can love who you love and not disappear. That the punishment they accepted as inevitable was actually a choice the system forced on them. They grieve what they cannot express. That realization is unbearable for someone who sacrificed their own truth to stay safe. So they project. They call queer people predators, groomers, and even pedophiles while hiding their own attraction to the same gender, and/or underage kids. They call trans people confused while suppressing their own gender dysphoria. They scream about protecting children while traumatizing their own kids with the same violent policing they survived.
The preacher railing against homosexuality while soliciting men and boys in secret. The politician legislating against trans rights while living a closeted life. The father who beats his son for being too feminine because he was beaten for the same thing and never healed. The woman who calls lesbians unnatural because she was taught her own attraction to women was sinful and she’s spent decades performing heterosexuality she doesn’t feel. These aren’t exceptions, they’re simply the predictable outcome of a system that criminalizes queerness, then forces people to enforce that criminalization on themselves and everyone around them.
Internalized homophobia is projection turned inward first, then weaponized outward. The person projects their shame, their fear, their desire onto someone living freely, and that freedom becomes the threat. The openly queer person becomes the enemy because their existence is evidence that survival outside patriarchy’s rules is possible. The projector can’t tolerate that evidence because accepting it means confronting everything they gave up, everyone they hurt, every year they spent suffocating. So they double down. They legislate. They preach. They harass. They commit violence. They destroy the mirror instead of facing what it reflects. That’s projection doing what it was designed to do: defend norms that were built to preserve hierarchy.
Xenophobia is one of projection’s most obvious playgrounds because the state depends on a manufactured “outsider” to redirect public frustration away from the actual architects of dispossession. Blame the other, rather than the fucking billionaire. Economic pain, housing crises, austerity, corruption, and inequality are engineered upstream, then blamed downstream on migrants, refugees, and anyone marked “foreign.” The violence that follows is not spontaneous. It’s socially produced. It’s politically profitable. It becomes a permission structure for raids, policing, exclusion, and abandonment.
Projection is a mass-distributed counterinsurgency tactic. It weakens solidarity by turning community members into each other’s surveillance. It breaks movements by flooding them with suspicion. We see it with how it turns Black, brown, and Asian communities against each other. It protects abusers by training audiences to distrust the harmed. It protects institutions by making whistleblowers look “unstable.” It maintains racial hierarchy by making truth-tellers look “divisive.” It maintains patriarchy by making women’s anger look “irrational.” It maintains able-bodied supremacy by making access requests look like “entitlement.” It maintains border violence by making refugees look like “threats.”
And the most devastating part is how projection is now packaged as moral virtue. People mistake their own dysregulation for righteousness. They confuse intensity with integrity. They weaponize “care” as control. They call it accountability when it’s actually humiliation. They call it justice when it’s actually punishment without analysis. In that atmosphere, the truth becomes harder to hold, not because it’s complicated, but because people are trained to treat discomfort as evidence that the messenger is the problem.
Let’s name the nervous system piece plainly, because colonialism is not just policy. It’s embodiment. A dysregulated person is easier to mobilize into cruelty. A frightened person is easier to point at a scapegoat. A person addicted to certainty is easier to recruit into propaganda. Social media floods the body with micro-doses of threat all day long. It trains hypervigilance as normal. It makes “being on edge” feel like being informed. And when people live in that state, projection becomes automatic. Their bodies search for a place to put the feeling. Racial empire logic offers them a map: put it on Blackness, put it on Indigeneity, put it on migrants, put it on Muslims, put it on queer and trans people, put it on women, put it on disabled people, put it on anyone the system already taught you not to see as fully human.
This is why “small amounts of information” is not a minor detail. Scarcity of context is the condition that makes projection easier to sell. Context interrupts projection. History interrupts projection. Power analysis interrupts projection. If you understand how colonial modernity was built, you stop confusing symptoms for causes. You stop mistaking the oppressed person’s anger for the origin of the conflict. You start seeing the system that manufactured the conflict and trained the audience to react to the wrong thing.
And this is where I refuse the polite framing that says, “Everyone projects.” Sure, humans have defense mechanisms. That’s basic. But not everyone’s projection is equally backed by institutions. Not everyone’s projection is equally protected from consequence. Not everyone’s projection can call the police, call HR, call the border, call the algorithm, call the media, call the university, call the court. When projection is carried by people with institutional power, it stops being a personal coping strategy and becomes structural violence.
So what do we do. Not inspirationally. Practically.
We treat projection like a weapon that leaves fingerprints. We learn to recognize the pattern: speed, certainty, accusation, moral superiority, refusal of context, refusal of repair, escalation when asked for evidence, collapse when accountability shows up, then a pivot toward victimhood. Every projection is rooted in emotional response, never in factual retort or historically verifiable truth. The projector doesn’t cite sources, doesn’t provide documentation, doesn’t ground their claims in material reality. They operate from feeling, from fear, from the need to defend a position they can’t actually prove because the position was never about facts, it was about protecting power.
We learn to ask one simple question that projection hates: “What feeling are you trying to get rid of by making me the problem.”
We learn to slow down, because speed is projection’s best friend. We learn to build community practices that reward discernment, not spectacle. We learn to stop mistaking public shaming for justice. We learn to stop confusing punishment with transformation.
We also get serious about epistemic sovereignty, because projection thrives where people have been trained to distrust the knowledge of those most harmed. Decolonial scholarship has long shown how Eurocentric institutions police what counts as “truth,” who counts as an expert, and which histories are centered or erased. Du Bois matters here not as a symbol, but as a methodological rupture: a scholar who tied racial capitalism, empire, and knowledge production together while insisting on rigorous inquiry that didn’t bow to white authority.
Workplaces and institutions have become projection factories because they are built on hierarchy and image management. They call it “culture.” They call it “fit,” meaning conformity to whiteness-as-governance norms. They call it “civility,” meaning obedience to comfort-centered governance. They call it “objectivity,” meaning the suppression of lived evidence that threatens the institution’s self-image.
Projection is also why so many people can watch atrocity and still ask for “both sides.” Because projection protects the viewer from seeing themselves in the system. It offers a fantasy: “I’m just observing.” No. Under racial empire logic, observation without accountability is alignment. Neutrality is not a location outside power. It is a room inside the house.
In this era, projection has become one of the most effective mass tools for maintaining racial empire logic because it turns unhealed emotion into public policy, turns personal dysregulation into collective scapegoating, turns platform incentives into racial hierarchy maintenance behavior, and turns accountability into “attack” so the system can keep operating unchallenged.
That’s why the work is healing, yes, but never only healing. Healing without power analysis becomes self-help inside a burning house. What we need is healing that restores discernment, and discernment that restores solidarity, and solidarity that restores governance back to the people the system was built to erase.
I’m not interested in a world where people get better at arguing. I’m interested in a world where people get better at stopping harm. Projection is not just a feeling. It’s a choice point. It’s where someone decides whether they will metabolize the truth, or weaponize their discomfort against somebody else.
And we’re done making space for the weapon. We’re building a culture where context is normal, where accountability is not humiliation, where oppressed people do not have to audition their pain for credibility, and where the projector is no longer protected by the system’s love affair with their comfort.
Racism: The System We Were Never Taught About
By Christian ZacaTecho Ortiz, Mar 23
Oye, mira.
As a Decolonial Social Scientist, my job is to study the world before, during, and after European Colonization. Why European Colonialism exactly? Conquest and Empires have existed since the dawn of human civilization, however it’s European Colonization that stands out as one of the most vile and insidious generational genocidal occupations ever because it not only created the construct of race to justify genocides and enslavements, but also the racial caste that plagues North America today, to include colorism and global anti-blackness. It also operationalized and weaponized patriarchy through religion and law. It’s the only occupation that created systems of oppression under the umbrella of racial empire logic that we’ve all inherited today.
But here’s what most people don’t understand: race was never meant to be who you are. Race was engineered as fuel for a machine. That machine, the system, is racism, and it was built deliberately to manage land theft, labor extraction, and wealth accumulation on a global scale. Race is not your heritage, your culture, your ancestors, or your pride. Race is a sorting mechanism. It’s a caste marker designed to determine who gets killed, who gets worked to death, who gets citizenship, who gets loans, who gets education, who gets medicine, who gets believed in court, and who gets buried in mass graves while the world looks away.
We’ve been taught to think racism is about interpersonal prejudice, hurt feelings, or ignorance. That’s the cover story. Racism is a governing logic, a structural technology, and an economic system that operates through law, policy, military force, education, healthcare, housing, employment, media, religion, and culture. It doesn’t need anyone to be consciously hateful to function. It runs on Implicit Conditioning, the automatic patterning of thought and behavior that makes racial hierarchy feel natural, neutral, inevitable. This is why it’s called, the system of white supremacy. I define it as, the system of racial empire logic.
So let’s get specific about who created this, when, where, and exactly why, because none of this was accidental. This was policy. This was economics. This was deliberate social engineering by people with names, in specific places, at specific moments, solving specific problems for wealth and power.
The invention of race as we know it begins in colonial Virginia in the mid to late 1600s. Before that, there was no white people. There were English, Irish, Scottish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch. There were Igbo, Akan, Mandinka, Kongo, Yoruba. There were Powhatan, Pamunkey, Mattaponi. People had ethnicities, nations, languages, and religions. They didn’t have race. What they had was status: free, indentured, enslaved. And here’s the thing that terrifies every empire: poor English laborers and enslaved Africans were working side by side, sleeping in the same quarters, running away together, and rebelling together.
The real breaking point was Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy colonist, led a multiracial uprising of indentured servants and enslaved Africans against the colonial government in Virginia. They burned Jamestown to the ground. The rebellion failed, but it revealed something that kept the planter class up at night: if poor Europeans and enslaved Africans realized they had a common enemy in the people hoarding land and wealth, the entire colonial project was over.
So the Virginia General Assembly, the colonial legislature controlled by wealthy landowners, got to work. Between 1660 and 1705, they passed a series of laws that invented racial categories and encoded them into legal reality. These weren’t cultural shifts, these were policy decisions. In 1662, they passed a law that said children born to enslaved mothers would inherit her status for life, making slavery heritable through the mother. That had never been done before. Slavery in other parts of the world wasn’t permanent or biological, you could be enslaved through war or debt, but your children weren’t automatically enslaved forever. Virginia made it genetic.
In 1667, they passed a law clarifying that Christian baptism didn’t free enslaved Africans, closing the loophole that some enslaved people had used to claim freedom through conversion. The message was clear: this isn’t about religion anymore, it’s about something else, something you can’t convert out of, something permanent.
Then in 1691, the Virginia Assembly passed a law banning interracial marriage and punishing white women who had children with Black men. The law explicitly used the term white for the first time in legal code to describe Europeans. That’s the moment. That’s when whiteness was created as a legal category. The law said that any white woman who had a child with a negro or mulatto would be banished from the colony, and the child would be bound into servitude for thirty years. They were creating a legal boundary, a caste line, a way to say: you’re on this side or that side, and if you cross it, you lose everything.
In 1705, Virginia codified all of this into the Virginia Slave Codes, a comprehensive legal framework that defined who was white, who was Black, who was Indian, and what rights and restrictions each category carried. White people, defined as Christians of European descent, could own property, bear arms, vote if they were men, testify in court, and move freely. Black people, defined as anyone of African descent, could be enslaved for life, couldn’t testify against white people, couldn’t own property, couldn’t gather in groups, couldn’t learn to read, and could be killed by enslavers without legal consequence. Indigenous people were defined separately and targeted for removal, erasure, and exclusion from whiteness and citizenship.
Here’s the key move: the Virginia Assembly also started giving poor white people small privileges that enslaved Africans and Indigenous people didn’t have. Poor white men got access to land through headright systems. They got the right to bear arms. They got the authority to patrol and police enslaved people, which became the foundation of modern policing. They got psychological wages, the comfort of knowing that no matter how poor they were, they weren’t Black, they weren’t at the bottom. They got just enough to make them enforcers instead of rebels.
The architect of a lot of this legal framework was the planter class, people like the Byrds, the Carters, the Lees, the Randolphs, the same families who would later sign the Declaration of Independence and write the Constitution. They weren’t just making policy for Virginia, they were creating a blueprint. South Carolina copied it. North Carolina copied it. Maryland copied it. Georgia copied it. The slave codes spread through every colony and became the foundation of U.S. law.
And it worked exactly as designed. After 1705, you don’t see multiracial rebellions anymore. You see poor white people siding with the planter class, hunting escaped enslaved people for bounties, joining slave patrols, and fighting to protect a system that kept them poor but gave them whiteness as payment. The people who had been indentured servants working beside enslaved Africans now saw themselves as a different category of human. That’s not natural, that’s Implicit Conditioning. That’s policy changing consciousness.
Now let’s go global, because Virginia wasn’t operating in a vacuum. European empires were colonizing the world simultaneously, and they all faced the same problem: how do you justify stealing entire continents, enslaving millions of people, and extracting wealth on a scale never seen before. You need an ideology that makes it seem inevitable, natural, even moral.
Enter racial science. In the 1700s, European intellectuals started creating taxonomies of humanity that ranked people by race. Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, created a racial classification system in 1735 that described Europeans as white, sanguine, and governed by law, Africans as black, phlegmatic, and governed by caprice, Asians as yellow, melancholic, and governed by opinion, and Indigenous Americans as red, choleric, and governed by custom. He wasn’t describing people, he was creating a hierarchy. He was saying Europeans are rational and superior, everyone else is emotional, chaotic, inferior.
Then came Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German physician, who in 1795 divided humanity into five races and called Europeans Caucasian, which he claimed was the most beautiful race, the original form from which all others degenerated. That’s where the term Caucasian comes from, a scientific-sounding word created to say white people are the blueprint and everyone else is a defective copy.
Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist, went further in the early 1800s and argued that races were separate species with distinct abilities, and that Black people were closer to apes than to Europeans. This wasn’t fringe science, this was taught in universities, published in textbooks, and cited in court cases. Samuel Morton, a U.S. physician, spent decades measuring skulls to prove that white people had larger brains and were more intelligent. His data was fabricated, but it didn’t matter. It was used to justify slavery, segregation, and genocide.
All of this so-called science gave legal and moral cover to what was already happening on the ground: mass kidnapping, the Middle Passage, plantation slavery, Indigenous genocide, colonial occupation. The ideology didn’t create the system, the system created the ideology. They needed race to justify the wealth they were stealing and the people they were killing.
And it went everywhere. The British took racial science to India and used it to classify Indians into martial races and non-martial races, criminal tribes and loyal subjects, all to divide and rule. The French took it to Africa and the Caribbean and created hierarchies between mulattos and noirs, Africans and Arabs. The Spanish and Portuguese had been doing it since the 1400s with limpieza de sangre, purity of blood laws, that separated Christians from Jews and Muslims, and then later separated Europeans from Indigenous people and Africans in the Americas through the casta system, a detailed racial hierarchy with over a dozen categories based on ancestry.
The Germans studied all of this. In the 1930s, Nazi lawyers explicitly studied U.S. racial laws, Jim Crow segregation, anti-miscegenation statutes, and citizenship restrictions before drafting the Nuremberg Laws. They said so in their own documents. They debated whether to use the U.S. one-drop rule, which classified anyone with any African ancestry as Black, or a more lenient model. They admired how the U.S. had maintained white supremacy through law for centuries and wanted to replicate it for Aryan supremacy.
That’s the lineage. That’s the receipt. Race was invented by landowners in colonial Virginia to stop poor people from uniting. It was codified into law to make slavery permanent and heritable. It was exported through colonial empires to justify global theft and genocide. It was dressed up as science to make it seem natural. And it was studied and replicated by every empire and nationalist movement that came after.
Now here’s the part people really struggle with: once race was created, it didn’t need the original architects to keep running. It became infrastructure. It got encoded into property law, so redlining could deny mortgages to Black families and build white suburban wealth. It got encoded into education funding, so schools in Black and brown neighborhoods got less money and worse resources. It got encoded into healthcare, so Black women die in childbirth at three times the rate of white women. It got encoded into policing, so Black and brown people get stopped, searched, arrested, and killed at vastly higher rates for the same behavior white people do with impunity.
The system runs on autopilot now. You don’t need a planter class writing slave codes. You just need algorithms that replicate redlining. You just need school funding tied to property taxes. You just need medical curricula that teach false differences in pain tolerance by race. You just need prosecutors who overcharge Black defendants and judges who give harsher sentences. You just need media that shows the mugshot but not the vigil, the looting but not the protest, the violence but not the cause.
And because it’s automatic, people conditioned into whiteness don’t have to be hateful to participate. They just have to do nothing. They just have to accept the house they inherited, the job they got through a family connection, the loan they were approved for, the neighborhood they feel safe in, the school their kids got into, the police who protect them, the benefit of the doubt they get in every interaction. That’s Implicit Conditioning. That’s the default setting. That’s how you get people who say they aren’t racist while living entirely inside the logic of racial hierarchy, benefiting from it, and defending it the second it’s named.
The people who created race knew exactly what they were doing. They were solving a problem: how do we keep people divided so they don’t overthrow us. They created categories, wrote them into law, gave some people privileges and other people terror, and made it seem like biology. And it worked so well that hundreds of years later, people still think race is real, still think it’s identity, still think racism is about individual bias instead of structural design.
It’s not. It never was. Race is a tool. Racism is the system. And both were created by people with power who needed a way to protect their wealth and their control. Now we know their names. Now we know the laws. Now we know how it spread. And now we have to decide: are we going to keep pretending it’s natural, or are we going to dismantle what they built.
The system was designed so well that people born into it, especially people racialized as white, are conditioned from infancy to see their position as earned, their comfort as normal, their access as merit. People racialized as Black, Indigenous, brown, Asian in specific contexts, are conditioned to see barriers as personal failure, violence as isolated incidents, exclusion as coincidence. That’s not accident. That’s architecture.
Let me be clear: European colonialism did not invent human cruelty, conquest, or slavery. What it invented was race as a biological fiction weaponized to justify permanent, heritable, categorical domination. The Moors conquered Spain. The Mongols built an empire. The Aztecs waged war. But none of them created a global system that encoded domination into biology, wrote it into law as science, and exported it as civilization. None of them created whiteness.
Whiteness is not a people. It’s not an ethnicity. It’s a power structure. It’s the legal, political, and social category invented in the 1600s to separate European laborers from enslaved Africans, to break multiracial rebellion, to create a buffer class that would protect property and kill on command. Before race, you were Igbo, Taíno, Nahua, Yoruba, Irish, Scottish, Italian, Polish. After race, some of you became white, and that meant you entered a contract: side with power, endorse the hierarchy, and you get proximity to safety. Break that contract, and you get reclassified. Italians weren’t white until they needed to be. Irish weren’t white until it served the structure. Jews have been white and non-white depending on what the state required. Whiteness expands and contracts, but it never stops doing its job, which is protecting the system that created it.
And here’s the trick they never tell you: you can’t dismantle racism by rejecting your racial identity, because race was never an identity to begin with. You dismantle it by refusing its assigned role. If you’re racialized as white, your job isn’t to feel bad. Your job is to break the conditioning, reject the comfort, redistribute the resources, and stop defending the structure when it’s named. If you’re racialized as Black, Indigenous, brown, your job isn’t to prove your worth or humanity. Your job is to survive the system, name it plainly, organize power, and take back everything it stole.
Now let’s talk about how this plays out globally, because European colonialism wasn’t just a phase. It was a blueprint, and every nationalist movement, every modern state apparatus, every caste system operating today borrowed from it, refined it, and ran it back.
Look at India. The caste system predates European colonialism, yes. But it was the British who codified it into law, mapped it through census categories, and weaponized it to divide and rule. They took Brahmanical hierarchy and turned it into bureaucratic infrastructure. They created legal categories of “criminal tribes” and “martial races” using the same racial science they applied to Africans and Indigenous peoples. Post-independence India didn’t decolonize the structure, it rebranded it. Caste operates today through every institution: education, employment, housing, marriage, violence, police impunity. Dalit and Adivasi peoples are erased by design, killed with systemic regularity, and told their oppression is culture, not governance. That’s racial empire logic wearing a local name.
Look at Israel. Zionism is a nationalist project born from European racial logic. It’s not a religious movement, it’s a settler-colonial one, using the same tools the British used in Kenya, the French used in Algeria, the Spanish used in the Americas: land theft justified through racial hierarchy, displacement named as development, and genocide framed as self-defense. The Israeli state uses the language of security to run an apartheid system where Palestinians are marked, surveilled, caged, bombed, starved, and erased. The same checkpoints, the same bantustans, the same legalized theft, the same propaganda, the same global support from white supremacy structures in the U.S. and Europe. That’s not coincidence. That’s replication.
Look at Myanmar, where the Rohingya are systematically erased through genocide while the world calls it ethnic conflict.
Look at China, where Uyghur Muslims are detained in camps, erased through forced sterilization and labor extraction, and the global response is muted because economic power protects state violence.
Look at Brazil, where anti-Black police terror and Indigenous land theft operate through the same logic of disposability that built the favelas and the plantations.
Look at the Philippines, where U.S. military intervention, Spanish Catholic conditioning, and Japanese imperial occupation created layered structures of colorism, classism, and nationalist violence that endure today.
Every single one of these systems uses the same tools: racialize a population, create legal categories of exclusion, justify violence as order, and operationalize it through police, military, law, and culture. Patriarchy gets weaponized the same way. Religion gets deployed as governance. Citizenship becomes a tool of elimination.
The U.S. locks more people in cages than any nation in history, and the people in those cages are overwhelmingly Black, brown, Indigenous, poor. That’s not crime, that’s design. The U.S. bombs seven countries simultaneously while calling itself a democracy. That’s not defense, that’s empire. The border is militarized, children are detained, people are deported to countries they’ve never known, asylum seekers are turned away to die. That’s not immigration policy, that’s ethnic cleansing through bureaucracy.
Racism doesn’t need hoods and slurs to operate. It just needs the systems to keep running. It needs the school-to-prison pipeline. It needs redlining to stay encoded in algorithms. It needs medical apartheid to decide who gets ventilators. It needs environmental racism to decide whose water gets poisoned. It needs the Supreme Court to gut voting rights. It needs police to kill with impunity. It needs media to show the mugshot, not the vigil. It needs history class to call it the past.
That’s why people say they don’t see race. They’ve been conditioned not to see the system. They’ve been trained to see outcomes as natural: why are those neighborhoods poor, why are those schools failing, why is that family broken, why are those people in prison, why don’t they just work harder, why are they so angry, why can’t they get over it. The questions are designed to hide the answer, which is: because the system is working exactly as intended.
Patriarchy was globalized the same way. European colonialism didn’t invent gender hierarchy, but it standardized it, exported it, and encoded it into law. Colonizers looked at societies with multiple gender systems, with women holding land and power, with matrilineal governance, and they erased it. They imposed Christian marriage law, coverture, rape as property crime, women as possessions. They criminalized Two-Spirit peoples, hijra, muxe, fa’afafine. They used the same tools they used to racialize: create the categories, naturalize the hierarchy, legislate the violence, call it civilization.
So when people ask why feminism needs to be decolonial, this is why. Because the patriarchy we’re fighting isn’t ancient, it’s colonial. The gender binary we’re taught is natural was exported through law and enforced through violence. The idea that women are emotional, weak, irrational, the idea that men are rational, strong, leaders, all of that is racial empire logic applied to gender. It’s the same system.
And the same goes for sexuality. Homophobia as we know it today, the criminalization of queerness, the pathologizing of transness, that’s colonial. Many pre-colonial societies honored gender expansiveness and same-gender relationships. European colonizers brought sodomy laws, conversion violence, psychiatric torture, legal erasure. They exported it everywhere they went, and post-colonial states kept it. That’s why you see homophobia in former British colonies using the same legal language. That’s why you see transphobia in Latin America using Catholic conditioning. That’s not tradition, that’s colonialism wearing a local mask.
So what do we do? We stop pretending racism is about feelings. We stop debating whether someone meant it. We stop looking for the smoking gun when the whole house is on fire. We name the system plainly: who holds power, who is targeted, how harm operates, what structures enable it, what accountability looks like. We stop teaching kids that racism ended with the Civil Rights Act. We stop acting like decolonization is metaphor. We stop treating equity like charity instead of repair.
We teach the truth: that race is a weapon, that whiteness is a structure, that racism is a system, and that every institution we’ve inherited was built to serve it. We teach that it’s still operating, that it’s killing people right now, that it’s not isolated incidents, it’s coordinated governance. We teach how to see it, how to name it, how to refuse it, how to dismantle it.
And we stop waiting for people in power to do it for us. They won’t. They benefit. We organize, we redistribute, we refuse, we rebuild. That’s the work. That’s what decolonization requires. Not inclusion into the burning house, but tearing down the structure and building something that was never designed to kill us in the first place.
That’s the system we were never taught about. Now you know.
=================================================================
Decolonial Glossary:
Key Terms from “Racism: The System We Were Never Taught About”
Anti-Blackness
A specific form of racism that targets Black people globally, rooted in the transatlantic slave trade and European colonialism. It operates through violence, exclusion, criminalization, and dehumanization across all institutions. Anti-Blackness isn’t regional prejudice, it’s a global structure that positions Blackness at the bottom of human value within racial hierarchy.
Casta System
A detailed racial hierarchy created by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in the Americas beginning in the 1400s. It contained over a dozen categories based on ancestry, mixing European, Indigenous, and African lineage, and determined legal rights, social status, economic access, and citizenship. It was an early blueprint for racial classification that influenced later systems globally.
Caste Marker
A designation that places people into fixed hierarchical categories determining access to resources, safety, citizenship, education, healthcare, employment, and legal protection. Race functions as a caste marker, sorting people not by culture or heritage but by who the system is designed to exploit, exclude, or exterminate.
Colorism
A hierarchy within racialized groups that privileges lighter skin and punishes darker skin, a direct product of European colonial racial logic. Colorism operates globally across Latin America, Asia, Africa, and among diaspora communities, determining marriage prospects, employment, media representation, and social status. It’s not preference, it’s internalized racial empire logic.
Decolonial
An analytical approach and political practice that identifies, names, and dismantles the ongoing structures of colonial power, including racial hierarchy, patriarchy, capitalism, and extractive governance. Decolonial work refuses neutrality, centers historically excluded peoples, and demands material redistribution of resources and power, not symbolic inclusion.
Decolonial Social Scientist
A researcher who studies systems of power before, during, and after European colonization using frameworks that refuse colonial epistemology. This work centers Indigenous, African, and Global South knowledge systems and analyzes how racial empire logic continues to structure institutions, policy, culture, and everyday life.
European Colonialism
The period beginning in the 1400s when European powers invaded, occupied, enslaved, and extracted wealth from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific. Unlike other historical empires, European colonialism invented race as biological hierarchy, codified it into law and science, weaponized patriarchy and religion, and created global systems of domination that persist today through racial empire logic.
Global Anti-Blackness
The worldwide structure of violence, exclusion, and dehumanization targeting Black people, exported through European colonialism and maintained through law, policing, media, employment, education, and culture. It operates in every region, including Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, not just the United States.
Global South
Countries and regions in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific that were colonized, occupied, or economically dominated by European and U.S. imperial powers. The term names not geography but power relations, centering peoples and nations subjected to extraction, intervention, and structural violence by the Global North.
Governing Logic
The underlying ideological framework that structures how institutions, laws, policies, and social norms operate. Racial empire logic is the governing logic of colonialism and racism, determining who is human, who has rights, who gets resources, and who gets killed. Governing logics don’t require individual belief to function, they run through systems automatically.
Implicit Conditioning
The automatic patterning of thought and behavior that makes racial hierarchy feel natural, neutral, and inevitable. This is the process by which people born into systems of domination are trained from infancy to accept their position within racial hierarchy without conscious choice. People racialized as white are conditioned to see their comfort, access, and safety as earned merit. People racialized as Black, Indigenous, and brown are conditioned to see barriers as personal failure and violence as isolated incidents. Implicit Conditioning doesn’t require hatred or conscious bigotry to operate. It’s the default setting, the autopilot that keeps the system running even when no one actively intends harm. It’s how you get people who say they aren’t racist while living entirely inside racial hierarchy, benefiting from it, and defending it the moment it’s named.
Indigenous Genocide
The systematic mass killing, displacement, cultural destruction, land theft, and erasure of Indigenous peoples carried out by European colonizers and settler states. This includes the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and occupied territories globally. Indigenous genocide is ongoing through policy, policing, environmental destruction, and legal erasure, not a historical event.
Labor Extraction
The process of forcing people to work without compensation or under conditions of extreme exploitation to generate wealth for those in power. Slavery, indentured servitude, prison labor, sweatshop work, and exploitative wage systems are all forms of labor extraction built into racial capitalism.
Land Theft
The seizure of Indigenous and colonized peoples’ territories through violence, legal manipulation, forced removal, and occupation. Land theft isn’t just historical, it continues through environmental destruction, resource extraction, gentrification, and settler expansion. In the U.S., every acre was stolen. In Palestine, land theft is active policy.
Limpieza de Sangre
Spanish for “purity of blood,” a legal framework created in Spain in the 1400s to exclude Jews and Muslims from citizenship and rights after the Reconquista. It later became the foundation for racial hierarchies in Spanish colonies, separating Europeans from Indigenous and African peoples and determining legal status, marriage rights, and land ownership.
Middle Passage
The forced transport of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas between the 1500s and 1800s. Approximately two million people died during the voyage due to disease, starvation, violence, and suicide. The Middle Passage is one of history’s largest acts of mass kidnapping, terror, and death, foundational to European and U.S. wealth.
Patriarchy
A system of governance that privileges men, particularly white men, and subordinates women, femmes, and gender-nonconforming people through law, violence, religion, and culture. European colonialism globalized and standardized patriarchy, imposing it on societies with more expansive gender systems and encoding male dominance into property law, marriage, citizenship, and bodily autonomy.
People of the Global Majority
The accurate term for Black, Indigenous, brown, and many Asian peoples who make up the majority of the global population. This term refuses the colonial framing of “minority,” which centers whiteness as default and numerically dominant when it is neither globally nor historically.
Planter Class
Wealthy landowners in colonial Virginia and other colonies who controlled legislatures, wrote laws, and built the legal architecture of racial slavery and whiteness. Families like the Byrds, Carters, Lees, and Randolphs created the system of racial capitalism that became the foundation of U.S. law and wealth.
Psychological Wages
A term from W.E.B. Du Bois describing the non-material benefits given to poor white people to secure their loyalty to racial hierarchy. Even without wealth, poor white people received social status, legal privileges, and the psychological comfort of not being at the bottom. This kept them from uniting with Black and Indigenous people against the ruling class.
Race
A socially constructed category invented by European colonizers in the 1600s to justify slavery, genocide, and land theft. Race is not biological, genetic, cultural, or identity. Race is a sorting mechanism, a tool designed to create permanent hierarchies of power. It determines who can be enslaved, killed, excluded, or granted citizenship and rights. Race is not your heritage, your culture, your ancestors, or your pride. Race is fuel for the machine of racism.
Racial Empire Logic
The governing code of colonial modernity that structures global institutions, data, culture, and behavior around the preservation of whiteness as power, not phenotype. Racial empire logic is the system underneath the system. It’s the ideology that made race seem biological, made slavery seem economic necessity, made genocide seem manifest destiny, made apartheid seem security, made dispossession seem development. It operates through every institution: law, education, healthcare, policing, employment, housing, media, religion, and culture. It doesn’t need anyone to be consciously hateful. It runs automatically once encoded. Every harmful social bias operating today, every form of systemic exclusion, every structure of domination is a byproduct of racial empire logic. It’s the umbrella under which all systems of oppression were created and continue to operate.
Racial Hierarchy
The structured ranking of human groups invented through colonialism, with whiteness at the top and Blackness at the bottom. This hierarchy determines access to safety, resources, citizenship, legal protection, education, healthcare, employment, and life itself. It’s not about prejudice, it’s about power encoded into institutions.
Racial Science
Fabricated biological and anthropological research created in the 1700s and 1800s by European scientists to justify slavery, colonialism, and genocide. Figures like Carl Linnaeus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Georges Cuvier, and Samuel Morton created racial taxonomies, skull measurements, and hierarchies claiming white superiority. Though debunked, this pseudoscience shaped law, policy, medicine, and education globally.
Racialized
The process by which people are assigned to racial categories and subjected to the power dynamics, privileges, or harms attached to those categories. People are not born with race, they are racialized by systems. Saying “racialized as white” or “racialized as Black” emphasizes that race is imposed, not inherent.
Racism (The System)
Racism is not interpersonal prejudice, hurt feelings, or ignorance. Racism is a governing logic, a structural technology, and an economic system that operates through law, policy, military force, education, healthcare, housing, employment, media, religion, and culture. It was built deliberately to manage land theft, labor extraction, and wealth accumulation on a global scale. Racism doesn’t need anyone to be consciously hateful to function. It runs on Implicit Conditioning. Once race was created, racism became infrastructure, encoded into property law, education funding, healthcare protocols, policing algorithms, and media representation. The system runs on autopilot now.
Redlining
A U.S. policy beginning in the 1930s in which the federal government and banks marked Black and brown neighborhoods as high-risk and denied mortgages, loans, and investment. This created segregated cities, prevented Black families from building wealth, and funded white suburban expansion. Redlining is now encoded into algorithms, credit scores, and automated decision-making systems.
Settler Colonialism
A form of colonialism where invaders come not just to extract resources but to stay, eliminate Indigenous populations, and claim the land as their own. The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel are settler-colonial states built on ongoing Indigenous dispossession and erasure. Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and continues through policy and violence.
Sorting Mechanism
A system or process that categorizes people to determine their access to resources, rights, and survival. Race functions as a sorting mechanism, not an identity. It was designed to decide who gets enslaved, who gets citizenship, who gets loans, who gets education, who gets killed by police, and who gets believed in court.
Structural Technology
Systems, policies, and institutional designs that organize society and distribute power, harm, and resources. Racism is a structural technology, operating through education funding models, policing algorithms, healthcare protocols, housing policy, and employment practices. It doesn’t need individual actors to be bigoted, it runs automatically once built.
System of White Supremacy
The institutional, legal, cultural, and economic structure that positions whiteness as superior and centers white people’s comfort, safety, and wealth while targeting and excluding everyone else. The system of white supremacy and racial empire logic are the same governing structure. This system operates through every institution globally and doesn’t require individual white people to actively uphold it, it runs on Implicit Conditioning and institutional design.
The System
The machine that race was engineered to fuel. The system is racism operating as governance, as infrastructure, as autopilot. The system is what keeps running even after the architects are gone. The system is algorithms replicating redlining, school funding tied to property taxes, medical curricula teaching false racial differences, prosecutors overcharging Black defendants, media showing the mugshot but not the vigil. The system is working exactly as intended.
Virginia Slave Codes (1705)
The comprehensive legal framework that codified race into law, defining who was white, Black, and Indian, and what rights and restrictions each category carried. These codes became the blueprint for racial law across U.S. colonies and states, shaping citizenship, property, marriage, policing, and violence for centuries.
Whiteness
A political and legal category invented in colonial Virginia in 1691, not an ethnicity, culture, or people. Whiteness is a power structure that grants access to resources, safety, citizenship, and legal protection in exchange for loyalty to racial hierarchy. It expands and contracts depending on what the state requires. Italians, Irish, and Jews weren’t always classified as white, their inclusion was strategic, not biological. Whiteness is not about skin color or European ancestry. It’s about position within the structure of racial empire logic.
Zionism
A political nationalist project founded in the late 1800s that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine. Zionism operates as a settler-colonial movement using European racial empire logic, land theft, apartheid law, military occupation, and genocide against Palestinians. It’s not a religious movement, it’s a political one supported by U.S. and European white supremacy structures.
The Malcolm X They Needed You to Forget: How Patriarchy Killed the Revolution
By ZacaTecho
Oye, mira.
As a Decolonial Social Scientist, my job is to study the world before, during, and after European Colonization. Conquest has existed since the dawn of human civilization, however it's European Colonization that stands out as one of the most vile and insidious generational genocidal occupations ever because it created the construct of race to not only justify genocides and enslavements, but also the racial caste that plagues North America today. It also operationalized and weaponized patriarchy through religion and law. It’s the only occupation that created systems of oppression under the umbrella of racial empire logic that we've all inherited today. In this piece, we're going to identify how even the most powerful movements in Black liberation were stifled through patriarchy and white supremacy.
Malcolm X didn't die because he was dangerous to white supremacy alone. He died because he was becoming dangerous to patriarchy, the structure that makes white supremacy governable. When he returned from Mecca in 1964, something had shifted. He wasn't just challenging racial hierarchy anymore, he was dismantling the gender governance that held Black liberation movements captive to the same domination logic they claimed to resist. He began naming imperialism as a global system, connecting African liberation to Arab anti-colonial struggle, to Asian resistance, to the dispossessed everywhere. He started building with women as co-strategists, not auxiliary support. He rejected the idea that liberation could be performed through masculine restoration, through reclaiming a throne colonialism had stolen. That made him uncontrollable, not just to the state, but to the movements that required patriarchal order to function.
The FBI and CIA didn't surveilled Malcolm X because he was Black and militant, and because he threatened the architecture of governance itself, the way power moves through gender, through tight hierarchies, through the policing of who gets to speak, lead, organize, and define the terms of freedom. COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was the FBI's domestic surveillance and disruption operation that ran officially from 1956 to 1971, though its tactics continued long after the program was supposedly disbanded. It was a coordinated state campaign to infiltrate, discredit, destabilize, and destroy political organizations that challenged white supremacy, capitalism, and U.S. imperial power. The program targeted Black liberation movements, Puerto Rican independence organizers, the American Indian Movement, anti-war activists, socialist groups, and anyone the FBI classified as a threat to "national security," which in practice meant anyone threatening white governance.
COINTELPRO's assassination programs targeted the possibility that liberation could be practiced without replicating the master's tools. They understood what too many movement histories still refuse to name: patriarchy isn't a distraction from racial justice, it’s the delivery system for racial empire logic. It's how colonialism becomes inheritable, how domination becomes culture, how revolution gets reabsorbed into the same structures it swore to destroy.
This isn't a story about Malcolm X being perfect. It's a story about what happens when someone with that much influence starts to break the script. It's about why the mainstream remembers the Malcolm who said "by any means necessary" but erases the Malcolm who said imperialism and Zionism were twin systems of racist expansion. It's about why we get the autobiography but not the organizational records of the women who built alongside him and were written out after his death. It's about how even now, his image has been sanitized, repackaged, and sold back to us without the internationalism, without the gender analysis, without the infrastructural critique that made him a threat worth killing.
We're told Malcolm X was killed because of ideological differences within the Nation of Islam, but structures pull triggers. The same structures that orchestrated Fred Hampton's murder, that disappeared activists across the Global South, that turned revolutionary leaders into controlled spokespeople or corpses. Patriarchy was the weapon. It decided who was expendable, who was sexually discredited, who was left out of the frame when history got written. It made sure liberation stayed locked inside a script where men lead, women follow, and anyone outside that binary disappears entirely.
If we want to understand why every Black freedom movement since Reconstruction has been destroyed from within before it could be destroyed from without, we have to name what's been protecting itself all along. Not just white supremacy. Patriarchy. The two are not separate systems, they are the same governance structure wearing different masks. One assigns racial value, the other assigns gender rank, and together they make sure power stays exactly where colonialism placed it.
This is the Malcolm X they needed you to forget. The one who was learning that you can't dismantle the “master's house” with the “master's blueprint.” The one who died before he could finish building something that patriarchy couldn't absorb. Let's remember him correctly. Not as a martyr to white violence alone, but as a casualty of the gender war that keeps every liberation movement from completing its work.
Malcolm X was murdered on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Three men from the Nation of Islam's Newark mosque were convicted of his assassination. One of them, Mujahid Abdul Halim, admitted his role and confirmed he was part of the NOI. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow, when asked whether Louis Farrakhan had anything to do with her husband's death, replied without hesitation: "Of course, yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it, yes."
This is the story we've been taught to forget. Not the sanitized version where Malcolm X became a martyr for abstract principles of Black liberation, but the material truth: Malcolm X was murdered because he refused to protect a child rapist, and the organization he helped build into a national force killed him to preserve patriarchal power disguised as liberation theology.
If we cannot name this, we cannot build structures that will survive. If we cannot interrogate how patriarchy operates inside our own movements, we will keep reproducing the same cycles: brilliant analysis, corrupt leadership, assassinated truth-tellers, and organizations that promise liberation while practicing domination. Please note, this isn’t about disrespecting Malcolm X's legacy. This is about honoring what he actually died for. I stand on the shoulders of Malcolm now more than ever. This is more than just being on the right side of history. It’s about laying the foundation for what we’re all building for generations to come. Collective liberation.
The Theological Con That Built an Empire
The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, a man whose origins remain deliberately obscured. He claimed to be from Mecca, born to a Black father and white mother, sent to awaken the so-called Negro to their true identity. The FBI and various researchers have traced him to possible origins in New Zealand, Oregon, or elsewhere, with evidence suggesting he may not have been Black at all, and that he had a criminal record under multiple aliases including drug dealing and a stint in San Quentin prison.
Fard told Black residents of Depression-era Detroit that white people were devils created 6,000 years ago by an evil scientist named Yakub through selective breeding, that Black people were the original people of Earth, and that Islam was their true religion stolen during slavery. For people drowning in Jim Crow violence, Northern apartheid, unemployment, and constant degradation, this was powerful. It centered Black divinity and named white people as the problem without hedging or both-sides equivocation.
Artikelinhalte
In 1931, Fard identified Elijah Poole, an unemployed Georgian sharecropper's son who had witnessed three lynchings before age 20 and was drinking heavily while struggling to feed five children in Detroit. Fard made him a minister, renamed him Elijah Muhammad, and spent three years training him privately. In 1933, Fard named Muhammad his Chief Minister and successor. Then in 1934, Wallace Fard Muhammad disappeared completely, leaving a succession crisis and a mythology that Elijah Muhammad exploited for the next 41 years.
Elijah Muhammad taught that Fard was Allah himself in human form, God incarnate who had come to save Black people and then returned to Mecca. This positioned Muhammad as the Messenger of God, making any challenge to his authority not just organizational dissent but theological heresy. You couldn't question the Messenger without questioning God. This is how cults of personality function: divine authority shields human corruption from accountability.
The Disappearance of Wallace Fard Muhammad, And Why It Matters
Wallace Fard Muhammad disappeared in 1934, and nobody knows what happened to him. Not definitively. The man who founded the Nation of Islam, who recruited Elijah Muhammad and set the entire movement in motion, just vanished. No body, no confirmed sighting, no paper trail that leads anywhere solid. There are theories, sure, but the disappearance itself is so complete that it raises questions about whether it was voluntary, whether it was orchestrated, or whether someone made sure he couldn't be found.
The official story from the Nation of Islam is that Fard was divine, that he was Allah incarnate who came to awaken Black people in North America and then returned to Mecca once his mission was complete. That's the theological explanation, the one that converts his disappearance into ascension. But that narrative also conveniently seals off any investigation into who he actually was, where he came from, and why he left so abruptly. It transforms a historical event into religious doctrine, which means questioning it becomes heresy instead of research.
What we do know is that Fard Muhammad was under police surveillance in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had him listed as a troublemaker, someone organizing Black people in ways that made white authorities nervous. In 1932, one of his followers, Robert Harris, committed a ritual killing and claimed Fard had instructed him to make a human sacrifice. Fard was arrested, questioned, and then reportedly ordered to leave Detroit. Some accounts say he agreed to stop his public teachings. Others say he was forced out entirely. After that, sightings get murky. Elijah Muhammad claimed Fard came to Chicago briefly in 1934, but no one else confirmed it. Then nothing.
One theory is that Fard was killed by police or federal agents who saw him as a threat to white social order, especially during a period when Detroit was a site of intense labor organizing and racial tension. Killing him and disappearing the body would've been a clean way to eliminate the problem without creating a martyr, though that obviously didn't work since his absence became part of his mythology. Another theory is that Fard was forced into witness protection or deported under a different identity. FBI records suggest they believed he might have been a white man or a man of mixed ancestry passing in different racial categories depending on context, which would've made him vulnerable to charges of fraud or subversion if his background was publicly exposed.
There's also the possibility that Elijah Muhammad had him killed. Fard had anointed Elijah as his successor, but there were other ministers in the Nation who didn't accept that transition smoothly. If Fard had stayed, Elijah's authority would've always been secondary. His disappearance cleared the path for Elijah to consolidate total control and to rewrite Fard's story in ways that centered Elijah's own leadership. That's not proof, but it's structurally coherent with how patriarchal religious movements operate when succession is contested. The founder becomes more useful as an absent deity than as a present human who might contradict the new leader's direction.
What's telling is that the FBI spent decades trying to track Fard's identity and never definitively concluded who he was. They suspected he was Wallace Dodd Ford, a man with a criminal record. They suspected he might've been born in New Zealand, or possibly Pakistan, or maybe Oregon. His name changed depending on the record. His race was listed differently across documents. That level of confusion doesn't happen by accident. It suggests either Fard was intentionally obscuring his past, or someone else was obscuring it for him, or the state was muddying the trail to discredit the movement he started.
The disappearance matters because it set a pattern. It established that the most important figures in Black liberation could just vanish, and the official story would either be silence or mythology. It normalized the idea that we might never get answers. And it made sure that anyone trying to build power outside white governance knew they were being watched, that their lives could be erased, and that the state had tools to make people disappear without leaving evidence behind. Whether Fard walked away, was killed, or was disappeared by design, the result is the same: a movement was left without its founder, and the questions around his absence have never been properly investigated because the people with the power to investigate were the same ones who benefited from him being gone.
Building Empire on Members' Backs
By the time Malcolm X joined the NOI in 1952 while incarcerated, the organization had fewer than 400 members after Elijah Muhammad's release from prison for draft resistance. Malcolm Little, a former drug dealer, pimp, and thief, found the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) framework transformative. It gave him dignity, purpose, discipline, and an analysis of white supremacy that explained his oppression without pathologizing his Blackness. He converted, became Malcolm X, and upon release dedicated himself completely to building the Nation.
Malcolm was a brilliant organizer, speaker, and strategist. He established temples across the country, appeared on television and radio, debated at universities, recruited in prisons, and built the NOI from a few hundred members to tens of thousands by 1964. Elijah Muhammad himself said, "I want you to be well known because it will make me well known." Muhammad understood that Malcolm's charisma and intellect would grow the organization, and he was right. Malcolm built the empire, Muhammad took credit and control.
That empire was vast. The NOI owned apartments, factories, farms, grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, clothing companies, and a small bank. Elijah Muhammad amassed a huge personal fortune at the expense of his followers, living in a villa called "The Palace" in Chicago's Hyde Park and wintering at a ranch outside Phoenix, Arizona. Members worked NOI businesses for poverty wages or no wages, told their labor was for racial self-determination and collective uplift. The wealth was real. The employment was real. But the power belonged to Muhammad and his inner circle of men.
This economic model was one of the primary ways Black communities built wealth during Jim Crow and the post-migration period. Excluded from white banks, unions, and business networks, Black people created parallel institutions through churches, fraternal orders, and nationalist organizations that pooled resources and bought property. The NOI wasn't unique in this. But like many of these institutions, the wealth didn't belong to the community, it belonged to whoever controlled the organization. The preacher lived well while the congregation struggled. The leader drove luxury cars while members donated their last dollars. And when anyone questioned the financial arrangements, especially women, they got silenced, expelled, or threatened.
This is capitalism operating inside a liberation movement. Collective rhetoric masking hierarchical extraction. The means of production owned by the organization, which meant owned by the men who ran it. Malcolm saw this pattern and it troubled him, but the full picture only became clear when he discovered what Muhammad was doing to young women in the organization.
The Girls Elijah Muhammad Raped
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, several of Elijah Muhammad's young secretaries became pregnant. These weren't adult women engaging in consensual extramarital affairs. These were teenagers, some as young as 15 or 16, employed in positions Malcolm X himself had recommended them for, groomed and raped by the man the entire organization worshiped as God's Messenger.
Malcolm X learned about this through rumors he initially tried to dismiss. He didn't want to believe it. His entire identity, his transformation from criminal to minister, his life's work building the NOI, all of it rested on faith in Elijah Muhammad as a moral and spiritual authority. Malcolm tried to handle it quietly, tried to rationalize it, tried to find excuses. Betty Shabazz, his wife, saw more clearly. She wasn't as deeply conditioned into the cult of personality around Muhammad. She listened to Malcolm's turmoil and helped him face what he was learning: the man they'd been following was a predator.
Malcolm investigated. He spoke to the young women directly. He confronted Muhammad, who admitted the relationships but tried to justify them through religious reinterpretation, claiming he was fulfilling biblical prophecy like David and other patriarchs who had multiple wives and concubines. This is how patriarchy always defends itself: through theological justification, through reframing rape as destiny, through positioning male sexual access to women and girls as divinely ordained rather than structurally enforced.
Scholar Karl Evanzz estimates that Elijah Muhammad fathered between thirteen to twenty-one children through these adulterous and often statutory rapes. Over a series of national TV interviews between 1964 and 1965, Malcolm X provided testimony of his investigation, corroboration, and confirmation by Muhammad himself of multiple instances of child rape. Malcolm later reflected that he was horrified to think of the number of girls and young women he had exposed to an adulterer (his language, though rape is the accurate term), considering himself little better than a procurer for Muhammad by recommending young women for secretarial positions.
When some of these women tried to hold Muhammad accountable, they filed civil paternity suits. Both women were in Superior Court on July 10, 1963, where they filed civil complaints asking that Elijah Muhammad be named the father of their children. Civil suits, not criminal prosecution. Elijah Muhammad tried to blame the pregnancies on someone else and tried to induce an assistant to assume responsibility for the paternity so he could retain his spiritual image. The women faced character assassination from the entire organization. The NOI put them on trial for violating organizational principles, as if getting pregnant by their rapist was their crime.
Muhammad's chief lieutenants at Chicago's Temple No. 2 were able to contain the rumors, sometimes through fear and intimidation. A 1962 FBI memo shows that the FBI knew about Elijah Muhammad's multiple extramarital affairs, often with underage girls, including several with whom he conceived children, and agents schemed to send anonymous letters to his wife Clara Muhammad as part of COINTELPRO operations. The FBI had the evidence. They chose counterintelligence operations over protecting those girls.
Elijah Muhammad was never criminally charged. He died in 1975, still leading the NOI, comfortable and wealthy, never held accountable. The girls he raped got blamed, erased, and threatened. Malcolm got killed for defending them.
How Organizations Protect Predators
This is how institutional protection of sexual violence operates, and the pattern repeats across movements, religions, corporations, and governments. First, the abuse happens in private, facilitated by power imbalances where the perpetrator controls employment, housing, status, or spiritual authority over victims. Second, when rumors surface, leadership circles close ranks to protect the institution's reputation rather than investigate the harm. Third, anyone who names the abuse publicly gets framed as the problem: disloyal, divisive, trying to destroy the movement. Fourth, if victims come forward, they face retaliation while the predator remains protected. Fifth, if evidence becomes undeniable, the abuse gets minimized as personal failing rather than structural violence enabled by patriarchal power.
The Nation of Islam followed this script exactly. Muhammad's lieutenants knew and silenced people through fear. Malcolm knew and initially tried to handle it internally to protect the organization. When Malcolm could no longer stay silent, he became the threat. The NOI newspaper Muhammad Speaks ran articles condemning Malcolm as a traitor and hypocrite. Elijah Muhammad told Boston minister Louis X, later known as Louis Farrakhan, that "hypocrites like Malcolm should have their heads cut off."
Artikelinhalte
This is organizational language for assassination. The boss doesn't have to give explicit orders. He creates the ideological justification, makes clear what he wants, and rewards those who carry it out. In the December 4, 1964 issue of Muhammad Speaks, Farrakhan wrote that Malcolm "is worthy of death." Less than three months later, Malcolm was murdered.
Louis Farrakhan: The Student Who Chose the Predator
Louis Farrakhan was recruited to the NOI by Malcolm X in 1955 when Malcolm heard him perform as a calypso singer. Malcolm mentored Farrakhan, groomed him for leadership, and Farrakhan became minister of Boston's Temple No. 11, then later took over Malcolm's former position as minister of Harlem's Temple No. 7 after Malcolm left the NOI.
When Malcolm split from the NOI and began publicly naming Elijah Muhammad's sexual abuse of young women, Farrakhan chose the organization and the predator over the truth. He didn't just stay quiet. He became one of Malcolm's most vicious public attackers, writing that Malcolm was "worthy of death" and using his sermons and columns to vilify the man who had recruited and trained him.
Betty Shabazz directly implicated Farrakhan in her husband's assassination. Malcolm's daughters have said the same. Farrakhan himself has admitted his words "created the atmosphere" that led to the assassination and said he "may have been complicit," but he's never been charged, never prosecuted, never faced legal consequences. He's 92 years old as of March 2026 (born May 11, 1933), still leading the rebuilt Nation of Islam since 1981, nearly 45 years of influence, wealth, and respect in segments of the Black community.
After Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, his son Wallace, later Warith Deen Mohammed, took over and began dismantling his father's teachings, moving the organization toward orthodox Sunni Islam and away from racial theology. Farrakhan opposed these changes and in 1978 broke away to rebuild the Nation of Islam according to Elijah Muhammad's original teachings, the same ideology that justified sexual abuse, patriarchal control, and organizational violence. Farrakhan positioned himself as Muhammad's spiritual heir, which means he inherited and perpetuated a system where male leadership is unquestionable, where exposing abuse is treated as betrayal, where loyalty to the organization matters more than justice for women and girls.
Farrakhan led the Million Man March in 1995. He's been platformed at major events. He's built wealth and influence. Malcolm was 39 when they killed him. He never got to see his six daughters grow up, never got to build the organizations he was forming, never got to develop his full political analysis. Farrakhan got decades. That's what impunity looks like.
The Movie That Couldn't Tell the Truth
When Spike Lee made "Malcolm X" in 1992, he originally planned to include Louis Farrakhan directly in the film. Farrakhan threatened him. Lee received direct death threats from Farrakhan about how he would be portrayed. The threats were direct enough that Lee removed all mention of Farrakhan from the film after receiving specific, direct threats from him.
This was about a man with institutional power and a documented history of violent rhetoric telling a filmmaker what he could and couldn't say about a political assassination. Lee complied. Rather than risk his own safety, Lee removed all explicit mention of Farrakhan and created a composite character called Brother Baines instead. Brother Baines, the composite character who replaced Farrakhan in the film, served the narrative function without naming the man who still controlled significant resources, loyalty networks, and the capacity to make good on threats.
In the film, Brother Baines recruits Malcolm to the NOI while Malcolm is in prison, mentors him, then later becomes one of his most vicious opponents after Malcolm leaves the organization, condemning him from the pulpit and helping create the atmosphere that leads to Malcolm's assassination. That trajectory mirrors Farrakhan's actual relationship with Malcolm exactly. But audiences watching the film don't know they're watching a stand-in for a man who is still alive, still powerful, still leading the organization that killed Malcolm X.
This is how power protects itself across generations. The movie gives you the emotional and political truth of betrayal, organizational machinery turning on a truth-teller, the atmosphere of threat that made assassination inevitable, but it can't give you actual names because naming Farrakhan in 1992 would have endangered Spike Lee the same way naming Elijah Muhammad's abuse endangered Malcolm in 1964.
Even our attempts to document history have to negotiate with the living perpetrators of that history. That's not film criticism. That's evidence of ongoing structural power, the ability to threaten artists, suppress documentation, and control narratives decades after the original harm.
Malcolm X was introduced to the Nation of Islam while he was incarcerated at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts, but it wasn't a single person who brought him in, it was his family. His brother Reginald visited him in prison around 1948 and told him about the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad's teachings. Reginald explained the theology, the idea that white people were devils, that Black people were the original people, and that a man named W.D. Fard had come to Detroit to wake up the so-called Negro in America.
After Reginald's visit, Malcolm's other siblings, particularly his brothers Philbert and Wilfred, sent him letters reinforcing the message. They were already members of the Nation and had been trying to reach Malcolm for some time. Malcolm was resistant at first, but the teachings eventually broke through, especially the parts about white supremacy being a structured system rather than just individual prejudice. That framework made sense of everything he'd experienced: his father's murder by white supremacists, his mother's institutionalization, the foster system that separated his family, the racism that had shaped every part of his life.
Once Malcolm accepted the teachings, he started writing letters directly to Elijah Muhammad. Elijah wrote back, and that correspondence became the foundation of Malcolm's conversion. By the time Malcolm was released from prison in 1952, he was fully committed to the Nation of Islam. He went to Detroit to meet Elijah Muhammad in person, and from there, his rise within the organization was rapid. Within a few years, Malcolm became the Nation's most effective organizer and spokesman, building temples across the country and bringing in thousands of new members.
So while Reginald was the first to introduce Malcolm to the Nation's teachings, it was his family collectively who brought him in, and it was Elijah Muhammad who sealed that conversion through direct mentorship. That's important because it means Malcolm's entry into the Nation wasn't through a single charismatic recruiter, it was through kinship, through his own intellectual hunger, and through a theological system that gave him a way to name what he'd been living under his entire life.
The Part of White Supremacy They Missed: Patriarchy
The Nation of Islam's analysis of white supremacy was largely correct. They named America as a settler colonial project built on genocide and slavery and essential for Black liberation. They rejected integration into a system designed to destroy Black people. They called for self-determination, economic independence, and armed self-defense. They understood that civil rights reforms wouldn't address structural oppression. They connected Black suffering in America to colonialism globally. That analysis was sophisticated, necessary, and decades ahead of mainstream discourse.
But they missed the part of white supremacy that allowed them to reproduce domination inside their own organization: patriarchy. They correctly identified that white supremacy emasculates Black men, denies Black men authority, criminalizes Black men, and prevents Black men from providing for families. Their solution was to restore Black manhood through discipline, structure, and patriarchal authority. This required positioning Black men as heads of households, community protectors, and religious leaders, which required Black women's subordination.
NOI women were taught to be modest, obedient, and focused on supporting Black men and raising children. Women couldn't hold the same leadership positions as men. Women's value was tied to their role as wives and mothers. Women who challenged male authority got labeled as infected by white feminism or as threats to Black unity. This gendered division of power wasn't incidental to the NOI's theology, it was central. The restoration of the Black nation required the restoration of patriarchal family structure, which meant controlling Black women's bodies, autonomy, education, and movement.
As historian Ula Yvette Taylor documents in "The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam," Black women in the NOI had to negotiate an investment in patriarchy in order to secure betterment of the nuclear Black family and, ultimately, the larger Black nation. They traded one form of subordination (under white supremacy) for another (under Black patriarchy), told this was necessary for collective liberation.
But patriarchy isn't a tool for liberation. Patriarchy is one of the arms of the octopus. White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heteronormativity, ableism, these are not separate systems that can be dismantled individually. They are interlocking structures that emerged together through European colonialism to create and maintain racial empire logic. You cannot challenge white supremacy while enforcing patriarchy because patriarchy is how white supremacy operates through gender. You cannot build economic justice while practicing capitalism because capitalism requires racial hierarchy to function. You cannot create liberatory movements while subordinating women, criminalizing queerness, or treating disability as deviation.
The NOI's failure was not that their critique of white supremacy was wrong. Their failure was believing they could build Black liberation on a foundation that reproduced the same hierarchical, authoritarian, patriarchal logic that white supremacy uses. They thought they could just change who was on top of the pyramid rather than dismantling the pyramid entirely. Malcolm X was killed because he began to understand this and refused to accept it.
Malcolm's Evolution and What It Cost Him
After Malcolm left the NOI in March 1964, he made his pilgrimage to Mecca and traveled extensively in Africa and the Middle East. He encountered Muslims of all races, which challenged the NOI's racial theology that white people were literal devils. He met with leaders of African independence movements and began developing a more sophisticated analysis connecting Black liberation in America to anti-colonial struggles globally.
Malcolm was evolving past the theological rigidity of the NOI toward a human rights framework that positioned Black Americans as a colonized population within the United States. He founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, modeled after the Organization of African Unity, to build international solidarity. He was connecting struggles across the Global South, showing how the same forces bombing Vietnam were terrorizing Black neighborhoods in Harlem, how the same colonial extraction happening in the Congo was happening through economic exploitation of Black communities in America, how borders and immigration enforcement were extensions of the same logic that created reservations for Indigenous peoples.
Most dangerously, Malcolm was developing class analysis and talking about building multiracial coalitions around anti-imperialism. He still centered Black self-determination and was clear that white people needed to organize in white communities against white supremacy rather than trying to lead Black movements. But he was moving toward understanding capitalism as inseparable from racism, toward seeing how poor and working-class people across races were being exploited by the same structures, even as those structures distributed suffering unequally through racial hierarchy.
This Malcolm, the one evolving beyond religious nationalism toward internationalist socialism while maintaining commitment to Black self-determination, this Malcolm was dangerous to every power structure: the U.S. government, which had him under constant FBI surveillance and was running COINTELPRO operations to disrupt his organizing; global empire, which didn't want colonized peoples connecting their struggles; and the Nation of Islam, which needed him silenced before he fully exposed the corruption, sexual violence, and capitalist extraction operating behind liberation rhetoric.
Betty Shabazz was pregnant with twins when Malcolm was killed. She was raising their daughters while Malcolm traveled and organized. She lived under constant threat, knowing assassination was likely. After Malcolm was murdered on February 21, 1965, Betty raised six daughters alone, completed her education, became Dr. Betty Shabazz, worked as an educator and administrator, and spent decades keeping Malcolm's legacy alive while demanding accountability for his murder. She never stopped naming who was responsible. That's partnership in struggle, raising the next generation of freedom fighters while refusing to let the truth be buried.
The Capitalist Architecture of Revolutionary Movements
Here's what we have to name clearly: the Nation of Islam, despite its revolutionary rhetoric about Black self-determination and economic independence, operated within a capitalist architecture that concentrated wealth and power in the hands of male leadership while extracting labor and resources from members.
Members worked NOI businesses for poverty wages or no wages, told they were building collective wealth. But who controlled that wealth? Who had access to financial records? Who decided how resources were allocated? Elijah Muhammad and his inner circle. The farms, factories, stores, and properties were owned by the organization, which meant owned by the men who ran it. This isn't collective ownership. This is hierarchical capitalism with religious justification.
The NOI told members to stop spending money in white-owned businesses and build Black economic independence, which was correct analysis. But economic independence doesn't mean creating Black-owned capitalist enterprises that exploit Black workers. It means transforming the relationships of production so that workers collectively control what they produce and how resources are distributed. The NOI changed the racial identity of the bosses without changing the boss-worker relationship. That's not liberation economics, that's racial capitalism with a theological veneer.
This same pattern operates across movements globally. Revolutionary organizations critique imperialism and capitalism while internally reproducing hierarchical extraction. The party leadership lives comfortably while members struggle. The organization owns property but rank-and-file members have no say in how it's used. Resources get concentrated at the top while labor gets extracted from the bottom, justified through language about sacrifice for the collective good or building the revolution.
We see this in unions that become bureaucracies serving leadership rather than workers. We see it in nonprofits where executives make six figures while program staff are barely paid. We see it in churches where pastors live in mansions while congregations donate their last dollars. We see it in political parties where elites control platforms while claiming to represent the masses. The structure is always the same: hierarchical control, patriarchal leadership, capitalist extraction, revolutionary or religious rhetoric masking domination.
If we cannot name this pattern and refuse it, we will keep building movements that betray their own principles. The brilliance of the analysis doesn't protect against corruption if the structure concentrates unaccountable power. The correctness of the critique doesn't matter if the organization reproduces the same exploitation it claims to oppose.
Why We Can't and Must Not Separate the Arms from the Octopus
This is the core decolonial lesson: white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, border imperialism, these are not individual problems that can be solved separately. They are interconnected arms of racial empire logic, the governing code of colonial modernity that structures global institutions, economies, and cultures around preserving power for a small class of people positioned as white, male, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual, and holding citizenship in imperial core nations.
You cannot dismantle racism while leaving capitalism intact because capitalism requires racial hierarchy to function. It needs populations who can be exploited for cheap or unpaid labor, denied legal protections, criminalized when they resist, and discarded when they're no longer profitable. Race was invented to create those populations and justify their permanent subordination.
You cannot dismantle patriarchy while leaving white supremacy intact because white supremacy operates through gendered violence. Colonialism relied on rape as a weapon of war, forced sterilization as population control, and the destruction of Indigenous gender systems to impose European patriarchal family structures. White supremacy emasculates men of color while positioning white women as property to be protected, creating gendered hierarchies within racial hierarchies.
You cannot dismantle capitalism while leaving patriarchy intact because capitalism relies on unpaid reproductive labor performed primarily by women: cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, emotional labor. This work is essential for capitalism to function, it reproduces the labor force, but it's unpaid or underpaid because patriarchy designates it as women's natural role rather than recognized labor deserving compensation.
You cannot dismantle any of these systems while leaving ableism intact because ableism defines whose bodies and minds are considered productive, valuable, and worthy of resources under capitalism. Disabled people, neurodivergent people, chronically ill people, and elders get positioned as drains on resources rather than full humans deserving care, which justifies denying them healthcare, housing, employment, and political power.
You cannot dismantle these systems while leaving heteropatriarchy intact because the nuclear family structure serves capitalism by privatizing care work, inheritance, and social reproduction. Criminalizing queerness and enforcing the gender binary maintains this structure by punishing anyone whose existence challenges it.
You cannot dismantle these systems while leaving border imperialism intact because borders enforce the global racial hierarchy by determining who can move freely and access resources versus who gets caged, deported, or left to die. Citizenship is the contemporary mechanism for distributing rights and safety along racial and national lines that directly map onto colonial divisions.
These systems emerged together through European colonialism starting in the 1400s and intensifying through the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. They were designed to work together, mutually reinforcing each other to concentrate wealth, land, and power in European hands while justifying that concentration as natural, inevitable, and beneficial.
The Nation of Islam understood white supremacy but couldn't see how patriarchy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy were part of the same structure. So they challenged one arm of the octopus while feeding the others, and the octopus killed them with the arms they refused to name. Malcolm began to see the whole octopus in his last year. That's why they had to kill him before he could finish articulating what he was learning.
What Movements Owe Malcolm Now
Malcolm X was murdered for refusing to protect a child rapist. That's the material fact underneath all the mythology. He was killed because he chose accountability over organizational loyalty, because he believed young Black women and girls deserved protection more than a powerful Black man deserved privacy, because he understood that liberation built on silencing sexual violence isn't liberation at all.
What movements owe Malcolm now is finishing what he started: building structures that cannot protect predators, that distribute power rather than concentrate it, that center the most harmed rather than the most charismatic, that name all the arms of the octopus rather than just the ones that are comfortable to critique.
That means:
Refusing to build movements around charismatic male leaders whose authority is unquestionable. Leadership needs to be collective, accountable, transparent, and rotational. The moment one person becomes untouchable, abuse becomes inevitable.
Centering feminist, queer, disabled, and gender-nonconforming voices in liberation movements, not as an add-on but as essential to understanding how power operates. The people most targeted by intersecting systems see those systems most clearly.
Creating financial transparency in organizations. If you're asking people to donate labor or money to build collective power, they deserve to know where resources go, who controls them, and how decisions get made. Secret finances protect corruption.
Naming sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and gender-based harm as political issues, not personal failures. When movements protect abusers to preserve organizational reputation, they become the structures they claim to oppose.
Understanding that criticism of organizational leadership isn't betrayal. Demanding accountability is how movements stay principled. The people who silence critics are usually protecting something that deserves exposure.
Building economic structures that are actually collective: worker cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid networks, participatory budgeting. Not businesses owned by the organization and controlled by leadership, but resources genuinely shared and democratically governed.
Connecting local struggles to global anti-colonial, anti-capitalist movements while respecting the specific contexts and histories of each struggle. Malcolm was building this in his last year, showing how Black liberation in America connected to independence movements in Africa, anti-imperialist resistance in Asia and Latin America, and Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
The Solutions: What You Can Do With This Knowledge
Knowledge without action is just information. Malcolm didn't die so we could study him, he died so we could build what he envisioned. Here's what you can do:
Study the connections.
Read decolonial theory, Black feminist theory, Indigenous sovereignty movements, disability justice frameworks, queer liberation history, and abolitionist organizing. Understand how systems connect. Read Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Dean Spade, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Glen Coulthard, Nick Estes, Haunani-Kay Trask. This knowledge exists. Access it.
Organize locally with global analysis.
Whatever your immediate struggle is, housing justice, police abolition, labor organizing, immigrant rights, environmental justice, disability access, connect it to the broader systems. Show how your local fight is part of dismantling global racial empire logic. Build coalitions across struggles.
Demand accountability in your organizations.
If you're part of a movement, union, nonprofit, church, community group, or political organization, push for financial transparency, democratic governance, and policies that prevent concentration of power. If leadership resists accountability, that's information about what they're protecting.
Center the most impacted.
In any organizing space, the people most directly harmed by the system you're fighting should have the most say in strategy and demands. That means formerly incarcerated people leading prison abolition work, disabled people leading disability justice organizing, undocumented people leading immigrant rights movements, sex workers leading decriminalization campaigns. Not allies speaking for them, not leaders claiming to represent them, but their direct leadership.
Name patriarchy every time.
When movements celebrate male leaders without interrogating their treatment of women, when organizations protect abusers, when rhetoric about collective liberation coincides with gendered hierarchy, call it out. You'll be unpopular. Malcolm was unpopular. Being right matters more than being liked.
Build alternative economic structures now.
Don't wait for revolution to create cooperative economics. Start worker cooperatives, time banks, community gardens, tool libraries, skill shares, mutual aid networks, and collective childcare. Practice the economics you want to see, even at small scale.
Support the people doing this work.
Movements need resources. If you have money, redirect it to grassroots organizations led by the people most impacted, not large nonprofits with celebrity boards. If you have skills, offer them. If you have access, use it to open doors for others. If you have platform, share it.
Protect truth-tellers.
When people name harm inside movements, especially sexual violence or financial corruption, believe them. Defend them when they face retaliation. Document what they're saying. The people who get silenced are usually telling the truth leadership doesn't want exposed.
Connect struggles internationally.
The same logic bombing Gaza is the logic that bombed Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, and Indigenous nations across the Americas. The same logic caging migrants at the U.S. southern border is the logic that created reservations and apartheid. The same logic brutalizing Black people in America is the logic of global anti-Blackness. Show these connections. Build solidarity.
Refuse nationalist solutions to imperial problems.
Black nationalism, Indigenous nationalism, and other forms of self-determination for colonized peoples are necessary as strategies for survival and resistance. But the endpoint cannot be creating new nation-states that reproduce borders, patriarchy, capitalism, and hierarchy with different leadership. The goal is dismantling the structures, not managing them more inclusively.
Remember that you are part of lineages of resistance.
You are not starting from scratch. Every tactic you're using, every analysis you're building, every coalition you're forming, someone has done before. Study that history. Learn from victories and defeats. Honor the people who died fighting. Continue their work.
The Revolution Malcolm Died Building
Malcolm X spent his last year building toward a revolution that would connect all colonized peoples in struggle against global empire. He was developing analysis that named capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy as interconnected systems requiring international solidarity to dismantle. He was moving past religious nationalism toward human rights frameworks. He was learning from African independence movements, pan-African socialism, and anti-colonial struggles globally.
He didn't get to finish. They killed him at 39, shot him in front of his wife and children, murdered him for defending young Black women against a predator. But the framework he was building survives. The connections he was making are clearer now than ever. The global movement he envisioned is still being constructed by people who understand what he understood: liberation is indivisible. You cannot free one group while others remain colonized. You cannot dismantle one system while leaving others intact. You cannot build justice on a foundation that reproduces domination.
The Nation of Islam had pieces of this analysis. Their critique of white supremacy was necessary. Their call for self-determination was correct. Their economic organizing created real infrastructure. But they missed patriarchy, and that omission allowed them to build a liberation theology that enslaved women, protected a rapist, and murdered their most brilliant organizer when he demanded accountability.
We cannot make that mistake again. Every movement that has failed, every revolution that became authoritarian, every liberation struggle that turned into new forms of oppression, the pattern is the same: they challenged some arms of the octopus while feeding others. They thought they could build freedom using the tools of domination. They believed hierarchy was the problem only when they weren't on top.
Malcolm learned better. He learned that liberation requires dismantling all the systems, not just rearranging who benefits from them. He learned that protecting the vulnerable matters more than protecting the powerful. He learned that movements willing to silence women to preserve male authority will always betray their own principles. He learned that capitalism dressed in liberation rhetoric is still capitalism. He learned these lessons and they killed him for it.
We owe him more than martyrdom. We owe him the completion of what he died building: movements that cannot protect predators, structures that distribute power rather than concentrate it, economics that serve people rather than profit, and global solidarity among all colonized peoples refusing every form of domination. That's the revolution. That's what Malcolm X's life and death demand from us.
His six daughters grew up without him because he chose truth. Betty Shabazz raised them alone while keeping his legacy alive. The girls Elijah Muhammad raped were blamed and erased while their rapist died wealthy and comfortable. Louis Farrakhan lives free at 91 while Malcolm has been dead for nearly 60 years. These are not accidents. These are the predictable outcomes of movements that protect patriarchal power over demanding justice.
If we cannot name this pattern and refuse it completely, we will keep building the same structures that killed Malcolm X, and they will keep producing the same results: brilliant analysis, corrupt leadership, assassinated truth-tellers, and organizations that promise liberation while practicing domination.
Malcolm X was murdered because he refused to protect a child rapist. Say it plainly. Remember it clearly. Let it guide every structure you build, every leader you follow, every organization you join, and every compromise you refuse.
The revolution he died for is still waiting to be built. The only question is whether we have the courage to build it the way he was learning to: accountable, collective, feminist, internationalist, and absolutely refusing to protect power at the expense of the people it harms.
That's the story they needed you to forget. Now you know. What you do with it determines whether Malcolm X died for a mythology we celebrate or a movement we complete.